Thursday, September 14, 2006

The mystery of lonelygirl15. . .solved!

A nearly four-month-old Internet drama in which the cryptic video musings of a fresh-faced teenager became the obsession of millions of devotees — themselves divided over the very authenticity of the videos, or who was behind them or why — appears to be in its final act.

The woman who plays lonelygirl15, whose first-person videos are among the most-viewed on the clip-sharing Web site YouTube, has been identified as Jessica Rose, a twentyish resident of New Zealand and Los Angeles and a graduate of the New York Film Academy. And the whole project appeared to be the early, serialized version of what eventually would become a movie.

Matt Foremski, the 18-year-old son of Tom Foremski, a reporter for the blog Silicon Valley Watcher, was the first to disinter a trove of photographs of the familiar-looking actress, who portrayed the character named Bree in the videos. The episodes suggested Bree was the home-schooled daughter of strictly religious parents who improbably stole time to upload video blogs of her innermost thoughts.

The discovery and the swift and subsequent revelation of other details surrounding the perpetrators of the videos — and the phony fan site that accompanied them — marks the end of one of the Internet’s more elaborately constructed mysteries. Whether fans, whose disbelief in lonelygirl15 was not willingly suspended, but rather teased and toyed with, will embrace the project as a new narrative form, condemn it, or simply walk away, never to be fooled again, remains to be seen.-snip-